People Who Communicate with Hidden Forces

In the mountainous west Hunan Province in China’s southern inland region, there are many remote villages where the mysterious practice to communicate with hidden forces is still very much part of the daily reality.

All Things ChinesePure “evil” forces are rare in the universe. Some are more constructive while others may be more destructive – destructive to others or to themselves or, often, both.

The destructive forces are mainly driven by their love for themselves, their obsession over fame, power and possessions.

Each of us has both constructive and destructive forces within, some we are aware of but most of them we don’t know their existence, let along to communicate with them and put them under control.

The forces in our environment and beyond are actually brought out by us when they have surfaced in our mind. Which is why we can in fact get access to them from within without practising external rituals.

The media in the village gives instructions on the arrangement of a ritual.

A ritual to communicate with the hidden beings or forces usually takes place on occasions such as before a wedding, after a death, during Chinese New Year festival or on other important events.

In the case of a funeral, the family members and their friends and relatives would sit around through the nights to guard the body of the deceased for a week before it was buried.

It is, in fact, a traditional Chinese practice for thousands of years, which serves two primary purposes: to prevent anyone to be buried alive and to provide the deceased enough undisturbed time to shift the focus of its consciousness away from the body that has ceased to function.

Two kids in a mountain village in the west Hunan wear a straw cover with the tip looked like a rooster head.

It’s part of the funeral ritual designed to escort the soul of the deceased in its journey from the human domain to another world.

The detrimental disturbance to the soul of the deceased, apart from being buried alive (or worse, being cremated alive), is to have a black cat to jump over the corpse. Cats are regarded as chiefly yin beings even though they live in the yang world, while the black cats have concentrated more yin qi than the cats in any other colours.

On the other hand, roosters, along with black dogs, are said to contain most yang energy in their blood so they can prevent beings (visible or invisible to human eyes), from disturbing the transition of the deceased and colonising the vacant rundown physical shelter (the corpse).

One of the village media’s expertise is to avoid the corpses from decomposing for 10 days or half a month, even during the scorching and sweaty summer season. They do so by spurting a bowl of water onto the body of the deceased while chanting a mantra and drawing talisman in the air.

This is a dancing parade performed during a memorial service attributed to their ancestors and deceased family members.